Mr. Pavitt is one of those people who earns an automatic bow of respect.

On a personal level, I have cause to thank him given how courteously he accepted my questions back in March/April when I was commencing my work on Dark Slivers. In terms of the wider universe, starting at square one; the guy was part of the original wave of punk fanzine writers, converting the Sub Pop fanzine into a record label, while managing grunge forefathers The U-Men whose first EP he founded Bombshelter Records to put out. In the meantime Bombshelter was a music shop and he was involved there too, he was writing a column in Seattle music paper The Rocket, ran a radio show and essentially was a man who lived and breathed the independent music scene around him.

I asked him: “what aspect of Sub Pop and your work in the scene made you proudest?”

He replied: “We let people know that culture starts at home. You have to support local scenes and independent artists if culture is going to move forward. We helped create a model for that.”

In that spirit apparently a cut of any profit from the new book goes to The Vera Project which seeks to involve young people in the Seattle area in different aspects of music and performance. Wow…That’s commitment to an ideal.